


The Couch

by MaloryArcher



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/F, Fluff, Romance, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 23:14:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13691856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaloryArcher/pseuds/MaloryArcher
Summary: The first time Lexa sees the couch, ugly and scratchy and free on the side of the curb, she knows she has to have it. She doesn't know why, just gets a good vibe. Turns out, years later, some of her best memories are made on it.





	The Couch

**Author's Note:**

> I am so bad at titles. It's like 2 am and I can't think of anything. All suggestions welcome (For real please help me)!
> 
> Also, I wrote this kinda spur of the moment, so editing hasn't happened yet *shrug emoji*

The first time Lexa sees the couch, she knows it’s perfect.

It’s on a curb, blocks away from her first apartment—the one she’s barely finished moving into—a cardboard sign with one word, _FREE_ , standing out against the cushions.

Her parents don’t understand the appeal when she sends them a picture of it, the light hitting it in an almost-flattering way, because, of course, they’re willing to send along more money if it means finding a nicer sofa in a department store somewhere. Neither does her little brother, who sees it in a Snapchat and calls her just to tell her it’s ugly as sin. Her best friend is adamant, when she sees it in person, that there must be something living, something doomed to a long, unhappy life, in the crevices of that couch.

Their opinions don’t throw her. Lexa sees the couch, and she gets a good feeling about it.

She has to have it.

She buys three tasteless hot-and-ready pizzas and a few cases of soda bribing her friends into carrying it, on foot. Without a truck between them, they take turns lifting, lugging, and sweating all over it in the cool, fall breeze. Four blocks feels like a marathon, but, before she knows it, Lexa can call the couch hers.

Scratchy as hell. Offensively ugly. According to Anya, probably steeped in strange jizz.

But hers.

Whenever anyone asks Lexa to explain why she wants it so badly, or how it’s grown on her so quickly, she tries to find a new way to say the exact same thing. Something about it, something in the brownish tweed, or the slightly oblong, orange rectangles, or the thick, red dashes that vivisect the rectangles, or the way it curves where other couches are made of hard and sharp angles, just feels _right_. The ugliest couch in the world, the one that she has to spend a good two hours cleaning before her friends will even lean against it, seems like the perfect fit for her small living room.

It feels like the type of couch that’s survived a million memories, and the type of couch to survive a million more.

And Lexa, she wants the last of her college years, and the years beyond, to be jam-packed with moments she’ll never forget.

 

The first time Lexa invites her classmate Clarke over to watch a movie for their film class—the one she checked out at the last minute, with only twenty-four hours left to finish a paper meant to analyze it—she braces herself for the criticism. Her couch has been the oddball centerpiece of her living room for weeks, and she’s a little in love with it, even if nobody else is.

She braces herself for a comment, however tactfully delivered, from the blonde who seemed annoyed, an hour ago, to have to follow Lexa home or to wait her turn and procrastinate even further. Lexa had been the one to check out the DVD, so it only made sense that she pick the place, and it made even more sense that _the place_ be her own, instead of one of the common rooms on campus with their shitty televisions and outdated media players.

Lexa’s braced for complaint, since, even though the couch is the perfect level of worn—with cushions that sink a bit into the frame but are years past the uncomfortable stiffness of new furniture—Anya still manages to groan and whine about the texture, every time she’s over.

Clarke surprises her.

“Where’d you get this couch,” Clarke asks, before she settles her backpack beside it and sinks onto the far cushion, “I seriously can’t stop looking at it.”

“That bad,” Lexa asks, feeling oddly self-conscious that the pretty girl who she occasionally argues with in class might be as aesthetically critical as all the people Lexa loves.

“Good, I think,” the blonde says, as Lexa sets up the movie.

When the brunette looks over her shoulder, Clarke is staring intently at those orange blobs, running her hand gently along the dotted line, with a look on her face that makes it seem like she’s trying to solve an incredibly complex puzzle.

Lexa settles on the opposite end of the couch, watching Clarke in a way she’s never been able to before, while six or seven seats away in a usually dark theater, careful to do it from the corner of her eye so she can save face if she’s caught.

When Clarke’s hand stops, when she looks up quickly at Lexa with a small smile that’s never been aimed in the brunette’s direction, it doesn’t seem like she’s noticed.

“I wouldn’t have pictured this couch for you.”

“No,” Lexa asks, because she and Clarke have yet to have a conversation that doesn’t relate to their class, “What kind of couch would you have pictured for me?”

“For you? Something sleek. Modern. Expensive,” Clarke says, very seriously, turned a little sideways, “Something black and leathery, with, like, metallic accents.”

“Really?” Lexa would never go for any of that, but it’s pretty much what her parents would’ve picked if she’d let them.

“I like this better,” the blonde admits, “a little scratchy, maybe, but it has character.”

“I thought so, too,” Lexa says, “Which is why I rescued it…from a curb…for free.”

“No way,” Clarke scoffs, and Lexa half-expects her to jump up in disgust when she realizes Lexa isn’t kidding. Instead, the blonde just runs her hand along the material again, and tells Lexa, in this sort of awe, “That’s so cool.”

Clarke smiles again, and Lexa smiles right back.

They go quiet to watch the film, but Lexa spends a good twenty minutes just thinking about Clarke’s smile, the one that she’s occasionally seen from afar in the glow of a light-hearted movie pointed in her direction.

And if she spends a few more minutes just floored by the idea that Clarke has thought about her enough to try to predict her furniture choices, well, at least she does it comfortably.

 

 

A few weeks later, when Lexa and Clarke have made viewings at Lexa’s place a regular occurrence—some for the class they’re almost done with, and some just because they realize that they enjoy each other’s company, that Lexa appreciates how fired up Clarke will be after two hours of obnoxious lens-flaring and Clarke needs to know if Lexa will be any more moved by the flimsy main romance plot than Clarke was—Lexa thinks she was right about the couch.

She was sitting on one of its cushions when she got the first of many just-for-her smiles from Clarke. She was sitting there the first time she heard Clarke snort from laughter. She was practically glued to the cushion during the most riveting, animated rant against Woody Allen she has ever heard.

And, to Lexa’s amusement, she’s sitting on that couch the first time Clarke kisses her.

She’s in the middle of the Star Wars rant to end them all, her body angled toward Clarke, gesturing maybe too wildly, and she’s a little bit amazed that Clarke never cuts her off when she goes in, not for the first time, about franchises failing to demonstrate the inclusivity they’re heralded for. Lexa gets a little lost in her herself, almost oblivious to the look Clarke’s giving her—something more than just interest, something that looks like adoration—but when she notices, she stumbles over her words.

“I, uh, guess I’m getting a little carried away,” Lexa apologizes, because, with anyone else, even with people who love her, there’s a point when she gets far too carried away. A point when they look at her with a mix of love and annoyance, and she has to reign herself in.

“No,” Clarke shakes her head. She’s leaning a shoulder against the couch, but her head is tilted in interest. “You’re absolutely right. You’re not getting carried away, you’re just—”

“I’m just…” Lexa prompts her.

Clarke doesn’t answer her.

She leans forward instead, undeterred by the creak of the couch, leans in close enough that Lexa’s eyes almost cross trying to watch her. Lexa hears the scoot of Clarke’s arm against the couch, dragging closer, until it’s just beside Lexa’s shoulder, then grazing it with fingers that are cool along the surface of Lexa’s shirt.

And then Clarke leans even closer, until she’s kissing Lexa. Her lips are soft, and her hands are cool, and she tastes a little bit like root beer and sour patch kids, and Lexa never wants her to stop.

They move quickly, because, like her hideous, perfect couch, things with Clarke just _feel_ right, and when Lexa feels that tweed scratching against her bare back while Clarke is warm and solid above her, she collects another good memory on top of the eyesore.

 

 

They’re on that couch again, months later, firmly settled into whatever it is they’ve been doing. They haven’t really talked about it, what they are to each other, but mostly because they haven’t had to. Movie nights are a weekly thing, joined by breakfast dates and dinner dates and sleepovers where they get zero rest and game nights with the friends they’ve learned to share, and so the idea of being anything less than everything to each other seems kind of hilarious.

Clarke is sifting gentle fingers through her hair, untangling the ends and rubbing tiny circles against her scalp, because Lexa is sick and a little pathetic and hasn’t left her apartment in days.

And it’s Valentine’s day.

She doesn’t think they would’ve made a big deal of it, but Lexa would’ve liked to take Clarke somewhere, preferably some place where they could’ve shared something entirely too chocolate-y—because Clarke loves chocolate, and Lexa’s pretty sure she loves Clarke—instead of spending hours cooped up with her head anchoring the blonde to the couch, and old television reruns droning on in the background.

She tried to keep herself upright, but Clarke hadn’t complained when Lexa transitioned from leaning back against the couch to Clarke’s shoulder to her chest to her lap.

It was a slow slide, with Lexa lacking the energy and Clarke lacking the heart to keep it from happening.

So, it’s Valentine’s day, and Lexa has been fighting sleep for as many hours as she’s been fighting the heaviness of her head, and she finds herself rolling over, so that her head butts into Clarke’s abdomen instead of facing the television so she can apologize, a little miserably.

“Don’t worry about it, Lex,” Clarke says, still moving her fingers through Lexa’s hair and leaning back to see her face better. “We can celebrate some other time.”

“It’s Valentine’s Day, though,” Lexa whines. “We’re supposed to do all the dumb romantic crap. Leave the house, at least.”

“You feel awful,” Clarke reminds her, “and you look it, in a weirdly cute way. Besides, I don’t need some stupid holiday’s permission to do romantic crap with my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend,” Lexa asks, trying to keep her voice even, because Clarke is _hers_ , and she is Clarke’s, if only in the sense that they spend so much time together that there’s no way they’re spending nearly as much with anyone else, but the “g”-word somehow hasn’t really come up.

Clarke’s hand stops then, just for a few seconds, while Lexa rolls onto her back to look up at her.

When she starts stroking Lexa’s hair again, she says, “That fever must be doing a number on you, if you think we’re not girlfriends by now.”

“Definitely girlfriends,” Lexa confirms drowsily, tugging the blanket draped over her waist up to her chin. She lets herself roll to her side again and feels a laugh rumble in Clarke’s belly.

If, in the few seconds it takes her to go from deliriously tired to soundly asleep, Lexa mumbles out something that sounds like, “girlfriends forever,” well, Clarke doesn’t tease her about it when she wakes up, her hands creased with not-quite-straight lines from where she wedged them between Clarke’s thigh and the couch.

What Clarke does do, after Lexa realizes that the blonde’s been looking at her fondly and holding her pee in for a stupidly long time to let her rest, is lean down, kiss Lexa’s sweaty forehead, and tell her, “I love you,” right before she wiggles out from underneath her and jogs to the bathroom.

She says it like it’s simple.

Not like she’s working out some problem. Not like she’s cooking up some complicated theory. Not like it’s some source of frustration she’s been waiting to talk out with Lexa.

Clarke says it like loving her is the easiest thing, the least complicated thing, the most joyful thing she knows.

And then, Lexa’s sitting on her ugly ass couch, feeling so good and so light that she almost forgets that her body isn’t ready to pick her up off the sunken cushions just yet, waiting for the chance to say it back.

 

 

“I take it back, you know,” Clarke says, when all their friends and family have gone and the last of their combined furniture has been moved into the house they just bought together. It’s far from the first time they’ve found themselves on what Lexa’s brother has called the Ronald McDonald couch, but it’s the first time they’ve done so in a place with their names on the deed.

It’s in the finished basement now, the centerpiece of their tiny home theater—wiggled and lifted and rotated by Lexa’s little brother and Clarke’s dad, because they _are_ adults, and had to invest in matching furniture sooner or later—but Lexa dragged Clarke downstairs as soon as everyone else was gone to make sure they didn’t start their life in the new home neglecting the one piece of furniture that had been a part of all their biggest moments so far.

“What,” Lexa asks, admiring the diamond on her left hand, just above a silver band, “the ring? Because it’s a little late to try to get that back.”

They’re three years into their marriage, and Lexa’s legs are probably heavy in Clarke’s lap, but the blonde just rolls her eyes and then smiles and keeps massaging her tight calves.

Lexa’s legs are probably heavy, heavier than usual, at least.

But pregnancy seems to have that effect.

“Not that,” Clarke scoffs, “but, I remember, a long time ago, I said I was surprised that you would have a couch like this.”

“A million years ago,” Lexa laughs.

“It’s been a while,” Clarke agrees. “But this couch is very you.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah,” Clarke says, and she bites her lip, just a little, in a way that drives Lexa a little crazier than usual, and explains, “it’s warm and it’s eclectic. A little ridiculous, maybe, but this place wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without it.”

“You calling me ridiculous,” Lexa mock-accuses her, lifting an eyebrow at her wife.

“Only in the best way,” Clarke promises, her thumbs still working their magic.

“I’ll take it,” Lexa hums, relaxing back against the arm, and folding her hands over the bump of her belly.

Lexa knew the couch was perfect from the moment she saw it, but, if she’d known how lucky it would be, or how many of her best memories would be formed sitting on this thing, well, she might’ve even offered the previous owner a few bucks for it.


End file.
